This is just a little story that’s been swimming around in my head all morning. It’s all true.
Two years ago, I had the opportunity to meet a woman at work. What I could recall the most was the sweet smile on her face and her shaved head that gave her a tomboy-ish look. If you didn’t hear her speak, you might even think she was a young teenage boy. I was new at my job at the time and she was the first client with whom I had participated in an intake during which she spoke of her love for writing poetry and her history of mental illness and abuse, also the suicide of her brother. She showed us the scars on her arms from cutting. She had a very sweet personality, however, and was not too ashamed to speak about her problem.
A week later, she was taken away in an ambulance. She had asked for a razor from the front desk after she expressed suicidal feelings with her case manager and went back to her bedroom where she began to deeply cut her arms and wrists. Thankfully, my coworkers were suspicious enough to check on her and called an ambulance when they saw what she was doing. One of my fellow trainees was left to clean up the blood from the floor and bed linens on her first full shift working alone.
I remember being told about this when I came in for my next shift and it deeply disturbed me. I even had doubts about whether or not social work was the right field for me. But I went back to work and she returned from the hospital several days later. She still had the same sweet smile, but she seemed very tired. Shortly after returning, she asked me if it was okay to give some of her old clothing to another client who had none except what was on her back and she moved out later that day.
We didn’t hear from her again until late last night when she needed to return after a violent incident with the same boyfriend as before. She still has the same sweet smile and love of poetry. She has a limp now because she suffers severe pain where she has driven several needles into her legs and they are going to stay until their presence becomes threatening enough for her doctors to find surgery necessary. She’s on so many medications that she slept so deeply as to wet the bed during the night. Later, when I offered her her own water glass for her room, she acted so grateful that it made me wonder when was the last time someone did something nice for her.
This is just a snapshot of the kind of things I deal with, abeit a more extreme example. I don’t know why I’m dumping it here. Maybe I just wanted an empty room to know why I feel so tired or cranky after work sometimes. Why I get bitter at the world and get so frustrated with my job I want to run out of the building screaming and never go back.
But I have and will keep going back.
